Many providers of communication services employ one or more communication servers, such as video gateways, access routers, and voice over IP gateways. The communication servers may act as video gateways, modems, fax handlers, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) servers and/or may provide any other communication services for a plurality of channels (referred to also as connections).
In some cases, DSP resource boards including a plurality of processors are used in the communication server. The DSP resource boards are generally used to perform specific tasks which require large amounts of processing power for relatively simple and/or repetitive tasks. Generally, each DSP resource board is planned for a specific configuration including a specific external interface and a specific processor layout. All the processors on a single DSP resource board that serve in directly handing signals have the same type of external interface.
U.S. patent publication 2003/0147473 to Ozu, U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,456 to Herdeg et al., U.S. patent publication 2004/0044902 to Luthi, U.S. patent publication 2002/0176234 to Sawada et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,381,541 to Begun et al., the disclosures of all of which are incorporated herein by reference, describe some such multi-processor DSP resource boards.
As technology advances, the number of different types of communication services increases. In order to compete in providing communication services, it is desired to provide a wide range of services. Therefore, communication providers are required to manage a large number of communication resource boards, supporting a large number of configurations, e.g., different interfaces, form factors and different processing abilities.